Legislators try again to put limit on Dunleavy contract with Trump's lawyer

The Dunleavy administration ignored the legislative limits placed on the hiring of former President Donald Trump’s lawyer for $600 an hour last year for an anti-union crusade.

Anchorage Rep. Andy Josephson is trying again with a budget structure aimed at forcing the Dunleavy administration to find a cheaper way to do business—potentially with one or more of the attorneys the state already has on the payroll.

The Legislature put a $20,000 limit on outside contracts dealing with the Janus decision, but Dunleavy vetoed that money in the budget, using money set aside for general purposes to continue the crusade.

Josephson says that the veto means that the state “has no legal ability to spend any of their civil division appropriation for FY 2021 on contracts related to this matter.”

William Consovoy, the Virginia lawyer who said President Trump could kill someone and not face prosecution as long as he remained in office, started off with a $50,000 no-bid contract from former AG Kevin Clarkson, who then doubled it to $100,000. Consovoy’s firm landed a second contract of up to $600,000 a year ago for Clarkson’s crusade against organized labor.

The state has spent about $600,000 already out of the $700,000, but the total may keep climbing as the contract says the amount can be “amended in writing at the discretion of the state.”

In February, Anchorage Superior Court Judge Gregory Miller ruled against the state and rejected Clarkson’s bogus claim—that the First Amendment rights of workers had been violated by voluntarily paying union dues. Clarkson and Dunleavy wanted to make it harder for unions to collect dues, which would weaken them.

Miller ordered that the state pay $186,020 in damages to the union and issued a permanent injunction.

The crusade should have ended when Clarkson texted himself out of a job, but AG Ed Sniffen picked up the cause and kept paying Trump’s lawyer $600 an hour to fight Alaska unions. Now the torch has been passed to a new general, Taylor.

There has never been a good reason to pay someone back East $600 an hour to write term papers claiming Kevin Clarkson was a brilliant legal strategist.

Taylor, Alaska’s third attorney general since last summer, should end the anti-union crusade and admit that it is not based on a solid legal argument and it will cost the state a great deal more money to get the claim to the U.S. Supreme Court, which was Clarkson’s vision.

But Taylor wrote legal documents for Clarkson’s crusade, so perhaps he too believes that voluntarily paying union dues violates the First Amendment. Legislators need to ask him about this during his confirmation hearing Friday before the House Judiciary Committee.

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